In conjunction with Bard Graduate Center’s Focus Projects, New York Crystal Palace 1853 and Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli tu, we have invited Brooklyn-based literary organization Wendy’s Subway to curate a Reading Room in the ground floor of the Gallery. Admission is free, as is the wifi!
Wendy’s Subway presents the Reading Room at Bard Graduate Center to promote engagement with artists’ books, periodicals, and other publications selected for their relationship to the spring exhibitions and public programs. Bringing together the boldest voices in poetry, literature, and performance, the Reading Series is an intimate, salon-style gathering that comes together on select Wednesdays once a month at Bard Graduate Center Gallery from 7 to 9 pm.
Submit to the open call on the subject of Ritual and Capital, co-published by Bard Graduate Center and Wendy’s Subway here. Submissions due by August 10, 2017.
Wendy’s Subway is a non-profit library and writing space located in Brooklyn. Wendy’s Subway hosts a range of public programs, including readings and screenings, interdisciplinary talks and lectures, discussion and reading groups, and writing workshops. The non-circulating library holds a collection of books and documents with a special focus on poetry, art, theory, and philosophy, as well as the Laurin Raiken Archive, an extensive resource for the study of art history and criticism. Wendy’s Subway is operated by its membership of poets, curators, novelists, artists, and critics with an interest in hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary discourse.
Originally designed by Tyler Polich and Hannah Wilentz, Reading Rooms have previously been installed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); White Columns (New York); NADA New York (with Aeromoto, Mexico City); Brown University, (Providence, RI); and the Carnegie Mellon University School of the Arts (Pittsburgh, PA).
Reading Series Schedule
Wendy’s Subway is pleased to present a monthly reading series in conjunction with the Reading Room at Bard Graduate Center. On select Wednesdays from April through July, poets and writers based in New York and across the country will read new work, variously engaging with titles in the collection and its guiding theme, “ritual and capital.”
All events start at 7 pm with refreshments available from 6:30 pm.
Wednesday, April 26: Readings by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Layli Long Soldier, and Wendy Xu
Wednesday, May 10: Readings by Chris Nealon, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Ada Smailbegović, and Jackie Wang
Wednesday, June 14: An evening of readings organized by the annual journal Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, with a special presentation of Eirik Steinhoff’s A Fiery Flying Roule (Station Hill Press). Featuring Steinhoff, Andrea Lawlor, Miranda Mellis, and special guests.
As the serial disasters of capitalism’s current crisis—economic, political, environmental—continue to batter the world, Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe is a device for recording, analyzing, and transmitting events as they happen. But it offers neither dire predictions nor false hopes. Instead, it embraces the mystery of what might transpire. Black Box is ultimately a documentary project, a record of the catastrophe, but it’s an open question where the inquiry will take us. It may be a record of the disastrous end. Or it may be a record of the turning. The first volume, published in 2015, contains an eclectic but accessible collection of reportage, interviews, letters, fragments, and theoretical responses from some of the brightest minds in critical theory
A Fiery Flying Roule (Station Hill Press) is a series of pamphlets by Eirik Steinhoff, handed out during Occupy Oakland in 2011-2012.
Wednesday, July 12: Feliz Lucia Molina, Danniel Schoonebeek, and Judah Rubin
Artist Bios
Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, The Brooklyn Rail, Eleven Eleven and Mud City, among others. She is a recipient of the NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship and the Whiting Award. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010) and WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017). She resides in Santa Fe, NM.
Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, 2009). Julian is a singer with the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits drum, and the lead singer and rhythm guitarist in the country bands Juan & the Pines (NYC) and The Western Skyline (Oakland). Currently in Queens, NY, Julian also sometimes lives in California.
Wendy Xu is the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017) and You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013),which was profiled by Poets & Writers magazine as one of that year’s best debuts. In 2011 she was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, and received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She has taught at The New School, the Creative Writing MFA Program at Columbia University, and New York University. She is Poetry Editor for Hyperallergic.
Chris Nealon teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two books of criticism, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), and three books of poetry: The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009) and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He lives in Washington, DC.
Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal has published four chapbooks: Burning Questions? (Gauss PDF), Ri Ri (Re)Vision (Publication Studio), This Is The ENDD (Wilner Books), and Close (Sibling Rivalry Press). She has performed at venues including the New Museum (New York), REDCAT, and the McDonald’s on Sunset and Fountain (Los Angeles). Her writings on art have appeared in Artforum, X-tra Arts Quarterly, and Rhizome, but most frequently in Art in America. She edits the Art Los Angeles Reader, a free, biannual newsprint. Her first book, a nonfiction novel about the Americana in Glendale, California, is forthcoming with Penny Ante Editions.
Ada Smailbegović was born in Sarajevo and now resides between New York, Vancouver, and Providence. She is an assistant professor of English at Brown University and holds a degree in Biology from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from NYU. Her writing explores relations between poetics, non-human forms of materiality, and histories of description. She is a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Critical and poetic work includes Avowal of What Is Here (JackPine Press, 2009), Of the Dense and Rare (Triple Canopy, 2013), “Some Disordered Interior Geometries” (Reanimation Library; The Volta, 2015), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene, 2015), and an article on animal architecture and the affective ethology of Monk Parakeets (Angelaki, 2015). She is currently at work on a critical-theoretical book entitled Poetics of Liveliness: Natural Histories of Soft Materials in 20th and 21st Century Poetry and a poetry chapbook, The Forest / or (On Waiting), is forthcoming from Doublecross Press.
Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (Capricious) and the essay collection Carceral Capitalism (forthcoming from Semiotexte). Find her @LoneberryWang and loneberry.tumblr.com.
Feliz Lucia Molina is a poet, editor, and co-organizer of Desert Poetry in Joshua Tree, California. Her books and chapbooks include Undercastle (Magic Helicopter Press, 2013), The Wes Letters (Outpost19, 2014), Crystal Marys (Scary Topiary Press, 2016), and Roulette (forthcoming), and her work has appeared in PEN America, SF MOMA Open Space, Gauss PDF, Fence, Jacket2, Night Papers, and elsewhere. She is currently based in Chicago.
Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and Trébuchet, a 2015 National Poetry Series selection published by University of Georgia Press in 2016. A recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, recent work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.
Judah Rubin is a poet living in Queens.
